Hollywoodland (2006)
I don't like Ben Affleck. I think he is an average actor who made because he had the benefit of having a mediocre script that he wrote with good friend and fellow hack Matt Damon, noticed. The fact that he has a chin doesn't hurt him either (the combination of chin and actually being able to write even a mediocre script is a relative rarity in Hollywood). He reminds me a lot of Rock Hudson. All that being said, I liked Affleck in this one. He didn't strike me as particularly appealing, didn't knock my socks off with brilliant, insightful acting, he just made me forget that I was watching half of the Bennifers. I was able to empathize with the character, a suicidal George Reeves.
I empathized a little less with Adrian Lyne's character, a seedy-ish private investigator named Louis Simo, hired by Reeves' mom to investigate his death (Reeves' suicide happens at the start of the story, his life is seen in flashback). The movie moves between the men's lives showing how they parallel. Bob Hoskins is once again the best thing in a movie, completely typecast as the ignorant, thuggish little pitbull though he may be. He plays a studio-boss, and with a handful of scenes gives you the back-story to his character without saying it, the true test of a character actor's talent. B-